High life | 23 May 2019

Goody goody gumdrops! The Donald has pardoned Lord Black and I couldn’t be happier. Conrad got a bum deal and spent three and a half years behind bars for charges I always believed to be phoney, most of which were overturned. Never mind. One can’t get back the years wasted in a cell for as good a mind as Conrad’s, but one does emerge from the pokey stronger.

The Big Bagel Times reported the Black pardon in a manner that can only be described as constipated. Black is a conservative, which is a red flag to envious lefties. But there’s something else. I have spoken to medical experts about the envy shown by lefty hacks, and I have been told that its origin is not only ideological, but also physical. British hacks and their American counterparts, I have been assured, enjoy a bowel movement only two to three times per month. They are full of you-know-what, which clouds their mind and makes them envious of their betters. This leads them to write and report whoppers. When I last spoke to Dr Klinghoffer in Zurich, a specialist in constipation and other forms of brain diseases, he insisted that lefty hacks are easily cured of their brain problems by daily colonoscopies.

But let’s get back to Lord and Lady Black. The closest I’ve been to being fired from The Spectator these 42 years was at the turn of this century over an article that Conrad memorably labelled ‘almost worthy of Goebbels’. The Standard reported the feud between Conrad and myself, and a large ad in the newspaper kiosks read ‘Taki almost worthy of Goebbels’. I had one of those ads framed, and when Conrad came to my New York house for dinner, while waiting to go to prison, there it was on my mantelpiece.